Tag: Health Care

Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that the Senate version of health care reform would include a public option with an opt-out, which would allow states to sidestep participation in the government insurance program. The White House reportedly favored a trigger instead, which is probably just a sneaky way to ... (continued)

Despite widespread public support and momentum in the House, the public option faces White House officials and conservative senators who looking to undermine it. In this plea for MoveOn, the always-insightful Robert Reich says to vote the bums out if they vote against you.

Dissent is alive and well in Los Angeles, with actions like sit-ins against health insurance companies showing a growing disapproval of the sorry state of the health care debate. Some activists are choosing to stay in jail in protest of insurers’ denial-of-coverage policies and in support of universal health care.

While the House is chugging along with what’s shaping up to be a strong public option, the Senate has come up with a compromise that might make room for government insurance. Essentially, states that don’t dig government-run health care wouldn’t have to have it.

The House speaker is thrilled to hear from the Congressional Budget Office that all three versions of the public option under consideration in the lower chamber would be cheaper than expected and would actually reduce the deficit over 10 years.

There may not be enough support in the Senate for a public option, as Finance Committee chair and health industry plaything Max Baucus contends, but according to a new poll, a growing majority of Americans wants one. President Obama says ...

The Bold Progressives (aka PCCC) have taken the health care fight to the home states of conservacrats Ben Nelson and Max Baucus and Republican swinger Olympia Snowe. Now the group is going after the man himself with a new public-option pressure ad.

If you thought last year’s federal budget deficit was pretty big, you were right—and it’s three times as big now! Thanks to the magic of the recession, as well as the government’s attempts to rescue various sectors of the economy (and throw money at others, or so it appeared), the deficit for the 12 months ending last month was a whopping $1.42 trillion.

For the first time in 34 years, Social Security beneficiaries will not get a benefit boost from a cost-of-living adjustment. Falling energy prices, in particular, should keep seniors flush with their monthly average $1,094 checks. So what if their health care costs have gone up by a third?

There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street.

Democrats have lousy timing, according to the AP: “Under the Democratic bills, federal tax credits to help make health insurance affordable for millions of low- and middle-income households won’t start flowing until 2013—after the next presidential election. But Medicare cuts and a sizable chunk of the tax increases to pay for the overhaul kick in immediately.”

Germany is one of the world’s great welfare states, but the country’s health care system isn’t strictly socialist. Nonetheless, lots of options, tight regulation and universal coverage are helping Germans live longer than Americans. Might the German example offer a way out of America’s health care struggles?

For a long while it seemed as if health care reform was progressing, if at all, at the speed of molasses. Now here comes The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait with his startling pronouncement that “it’s just quietly turned into a fait accompli.” Wait, what?

The California governor and rare Hollywood Republican released a statement Tuesday in support of health care reform, in which he praised the president and urged his “colleagues on both sides of the political aisle at the national level to move forward and accomplish these vital goals for the American people.”

Good to know there are some seemingly dyed-in-the-wool GOP types who are at least partly open to some of the health care reform proposals knocking around the halls of Congress. Count among that tiny minority the former Senate Republican chief Bill Frist, who says he’d vote for the measure despite its shortcomings.

The partisan nonsense meter hit a high Thursday following a protracted bout of bickering in the House that heated up after Florida Rep. Alan Grayson made his views about his Republican colleagues eminently clear, but he’s not sorry, and he’s not apologizing—at least not yet. This does not please said colleagues, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t in a hurry to appease them either.

Rep. Alan Grayson, the congressman who said the Republican health care plan is for Americans to die quicker, tells Wolf Blitzer and friends what’s up: “Democrats have to have guts. And now we have to have the guts to take the majority that the American people have given us and do something with it.”

With Ted Kennedy’s death, the Democrats fell one vote short of the 60-seat threshold needed to stop a filibuster in the Senate. But now the governor of Massachusetts has named former Democratic Party Chairman Paul Kirk to temporarily fill Kennedy’s seat, giving the Democrats a major tool in the fight for health care reform.

All of the health bills on offer, even the supposedly “liberal” House bill, are already centrist compromises built on a private health insurance market. Above, Olympia Snowe, who may turn out to be the single Senate Republican voting for reform.

This just in from President Obama: Being rude is the easiest way to get airtime. Well, at least that’s his take on the lows to which public discourse has sunk of late, especially concerning the keenly contentious issue that is health care reform.

If you haven’t been following Sen. Chuck Grassley’s psychodrama, here are the recent developments. The Republican who personally delayed a health care reform has pretty much decided not to vote for any bill, even if he likes it, and is now offended that the president had the audacity to quote him accurately.

Democrats would like an interim senator to fill Ted Kennedy’s shoes until a January election provides a more permanent solution, and the Massachusetts House of Representatives on Thursday agreed to give Gov. Deval Patrick the power to appoint just such a person.

Bill O’Reilly says of the very public option that makes his Foxy friends’ heads explode: “I want that. ... [I]f the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.” Quick, look out your window to see the flying pigs.

Sen. Max Baucus bent over backward to please Republicans with his insurance-friendly vision of health care reform, which forces everyone to buy private insurance and has no public option, but the very Republicans he negotiated with now won’t have anything to do with the bill.

If these anti-Obama marchers are to be believed, fascism and socialism are the same thing, abortion caused 9/11 and “Glenn Beck is such a logical thinker.” There’s a whole pile of crazy where that came from.

How much of a backlash should Rep. Joe Wilson endure, and in what form, for his “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s speech nearly a week ago? Well, on Tuesday, the House was nearing a conclusion about whether to officially admonish Wilson—whatever that might mean. (Update: Wilson admonished.)

The White House was worried President Obama’s major health care address would get lost in the commemorations of 9/11. They didn’t know about Joe Wilson, the heretofore unknown South Carolina congressman who is now the national poster boy for the disaffected and ill-informed white people hurling tea bags and insults at the president.

When emotions run high about certain hot-button issues, good judgment can fall by the wayside, and facts can get lost in the shuffle. Luckily, the helpful researchers at FactCheck.org are around to round them up again, as they’ve done here with President Obama’s health care speech.

Two can play this game, Joe Wilson. While the South Carolina congressman’s heckle heard ’round the country triggered dismay from his opponents and enthusiasm from his supporters, Rep. Wilson’s “You lie!” war cry to Obama provided humor fodder for David Letterman’s Thursday night show.

So, Congressman Joe Wilson heckled President Obama during Wednesday’s speech on health care reform. On Thursday, Obama accepted Wilson’s apology, but that same day the South Carolina lawmaker leveraged the situation by posting this video calling for voters’ support and announcing he was “under attack by liberals for standing up against a government takeover of health care.”

As some politicians in the U.S. continue to get their gender-respective panties/underwear in a bunch over government spending to help people, “conservative” Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to “save the human race” from global warming with a carbon tax to help cut fossil fuel usage in France.